Vergo Index || Image Research and Practice
Proposed by: @NatLoyola
@incubadorapt-dao and @creativesdao-council
Vergo Index is a project that brings together theory, research and practice within the broad field of image in a contemporary context. We stand on the principle that the act of thinking apropos of image goes beyond the field of art and is part of an empirical current social understanding. Vergo Index intends to cure proposals in the realm of amplified image, applied by practices allied to research. It is a live project under continuous construction, prone to pedagogical multi-voicing.
As a pilot edition, the Vergo Index project invites the CAC to teach and mediate a series of 4 workshops on amplified image . The first workshop will deal with the active archive of Aby Warburg that challenges us to develop visual thinking. Aby Warburg bequeathed us the Atlas Mnemosyne and the heuristic technology of his laboratory-library, both proposals for an active relationship with images, where what is at stake are not affirmative answers, but the expansion of possibilities and methods on thinking by way of the image. This is the first intersection with CAC , a research center in Brazilian aesthetics that currently operates under the MTH, a methodology that also proposes a much more involved and alive relationship between theory, practice and the everyday life.
Why should we think about images? Image seems to be a self-evident concept, however it is not an easy task to conceptualize image, and more so to reduce it to a single answer. The Vergo Index project believes that thinking and exercising image is important for us to reconstruct a past. The reconstruction of the past happens daily to enable building the future - issues related to images are at the epicenter of a war of narratives, hence the importance of projects like Vergo Index
The evolution of image through time
A series of seminars by Conglomerado Atelier do Centro (Brazil)
Each seminar consists of 2 days, 2 hours per day
Every seminar is online
The language spoken in these seminars is Portuguese
$400 per seminar
Seminar’s Schedule
January: lecture by Anna Israel
February: lecture by Rubens EspĂrito Santo
March: lecture by Ana Mohallem
April: lecture by Rodrigo Cassia
First seminar to happen ideally on the second half of January
About the Seminars
What is an image? Both for art and as as a production by the eye, physiology and neurology - so, the aesthetic image and the scientific image: how do our eyes work, how vision works? We explore image through the visual arts strictu sensu (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc), in applied aesthetics (architecture for example) and in philosophy (as in the concept “the care of the self”
Why join these seminars?
- To improve your faculty of “seeing” / to develop a “care of the self”
- To trace connections between aethetics and the practical life. These seminars will be an introduction to a way of studying that aims to create deep ties between theory and real life, and isn’t isolated inside the academy.
- Access to a multidisciplinary bibliography around the subject of image
How it will happen
Through two-days seminars each month, for four months, given by members of the Conglomerado Atelier do Centro, including its founder, the artist Rubens EspĂrito Santo. Each seminar will approach the main theme through a different perspective and from a specific bibliography - by these the purpose isn’t to arrive at a final answer, but to weave a web around the matter in question.
Seminar I: Anna Israel / January 2022
" The tenacity of the survivals, their very “power,” as Tylor says, comes to light in the tenuousness of miniscule, superfluous, derisory, or abnormal things. It is in the recurrent symptom, in games, in the pathology of language, and in the unconsciousness of forms that survival as such is to be found." - Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image
How to think Aby Warburg in the 21st century? What would Aby Warburg betaking into account in his thought construction in this moment of time that we live in? How to think Aby Warburg through Aby Warburg and not as mere spectator, not as an outsider to the problem, that is, how to use Aby Warbuarg to think? In this inaugural lecture we will investigate what supports and what are the practical implications of this that we call “art history”
Seminar II: RES / February 2022
We will go deeper in the question of what is really an image. What is the “care of self” and how this relates to the image (eye) / vision / beaury. This seminar will investigate the union between aesthetics, science and real life - how aesthetics can have a real impact in our day by day life.
Seminar III: Ana Mohallem / March 2022
This seminar will focus in the chemical a physiological aspects of the eye, we will go through the mechanics of vision. How do we create what we see? What are the limitations of the eye as our interface with the world outside ourselves and how can we cope with these insufficiencies? A scientific approach to vision and how this relates to the image.
Seminar IV: Rodrigo Cassia / April 2022
Art practice, studio art, the daily life of an artist in his studio. How can a young artist articulate his subjective and objective desires? What is the relationship between a pressure cooker and art? Why is it important that aesthetics extrapolate the artistic media and joins the daily life?
Preliminary Bibliography
- The Surviving Image; Georges Didi-Huberman
- The Birth of Tragedy; Friedrich Nietsche
- Visual intelligence - How we Create What We See; Daniel Hoffmann
- Documentary: Spaceship Earth, 2020, Dir. Matt Wolf
- You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics; Peter Sloterdijk
- After the End of Art; Arthur Danto
- Conversas com Francis Bacon; Frank Maubert
- Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation; Gilles Deleuze
- A Natureza ĂŤntima da Arte; Anna Israel
- Pedagogia + Plástica + Filosofia = MTH RES; Rubens EspĂrito Santo
- Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp; Pierre Cabanne
- Art and Agency; Alfred Gell
- Power of Art; Simon Schama
- Art History; Ernst Gombrich
- Meditations on a Hobby Horse; Ernst Gombrich
- The Felt Hat; Joseph Beuys
- The Art of Memory; Frances Yates
- El Imperativo Estético; Peter Sloterdijk
- Lectures on Aesthetics; Hegel
- Magic Mountain; Thomas Mann
A brief presentation of Conglomerado Atelier do Centro by Anna Israel
The Conglomerado Atelier do Centro (CAC) was founded by the artist, pedagogue and thinker Rubens EspĂrito Santo in 2000. In those years, Rubens built the MĂ©thodo, which is basically what sustains the Atelier do Centro’s organism. It could be said that it is the “constitution” of the Atelier do Centro, or the way of how social, economic and political laws of the Atelier do Centro are implemented. The economy of the CAC depends entirely on this platform and it also concerns the organizational exchange system of the Atelier. All of the students pay a certain amount to attend the Atelier do Centro, and this amount depends on how much he wants to get involved in the Atelier, and also on how much he can afford. It is important to underline that all of the money that goes into the Atelier do Centro is invested in the Atelier itself, in the physical and subjective structure of the Atelier, in its kitchen, in the purchase of materials, and in its library. Another fundamental element of the Atelier are the technical trainings, in which the student learns in an empirical way about the construction of a project which involves organization, the purchase of materials, and the use of tools. The conversations are about aesthetics, and mainly, about ethics. In this way, the student can discover areas of practical interest of which he did not necessarily have previous knowledge, and then appropriate it to his own production. Classes are also administered by the students themselves, thus making the student articulate other displays of agency as a student, so that he is not only a passive agent, but also an agent of this organization. In this platform, it is taken very seriously that the student dedicates himself, and that the student exits a comfort zone and elucidations about himself, and faces the real world; in this way, there is not necessarily a restriction in the object of interest of the student, but in the method it is required that he dedicates himself to the material construction of this object of interest in a broader way. Therefore, aspects which are highly encouraged are organization, journaling, reading, and
discipline.The MĂ©thodois the willingness to structure a (collapsed) bridge between the practical world and the world of thought. That is, it is a constituent part that the student not only develops an intellectual capacity, but also knows how to act in the real world.
Mini-bio RES
Rubens EspĂrito Santo (RES), is a 55-year-old Brazilian artist, thinker and pedagogue based in SĂŁo Paulo, Brazil. With 30 years of artistic work, he is the founder of the Conglomerate Atelier do Centro, created in 2000, and is dedicated to the management and logistics of this space.
RES studied Semiotics with Prof. SĂ´nia Leal Guedes do Nascimento, Aesthetics and philosophy with the German astrophysicist and art philosopher Dr. Christophe Kotanyi, was a student of the Philosophy Course at the Santa Terezinha Superior Institute of Philosophy and of the Course of art theory with Prof. and Belgian historian Thierry de Duve.
In 2020, RES won the “Festival Arte como Respiro” award from Itaú Cultural and “Respirarte” from Funarte; throughout his career, he participated in the CCSP Exhibition Program, Bienal Paralela, São Paulo State Pinacoteca, Tomie Ohtake, Maria Antônia University Center at USP, among others.
“RES is not a visual artist, but a necromancer who, in his so-called Friday Sessions, drinks the spoiled milk that humanity has refused, giving it back, in addition to air and life, its refused place in the sacred and lost temple of our time – using, for this, whatever is in front of him.
His classes have no time to start or end – whether they are given by him or all the time or none at all, as they are invisible to many people – except for those desperately looking for redemption.” CCS, 2019
Mini-bio Nat Loyola
Natália Loyola (Campinas, 1981) has a degree in Social Communication – Journalism (PUC Campinas) and is finishing her Masters in Anthropology – Visual Cultures at Universidade Nova de Lisboa. She is also the recipient of a grant for the Erasmus+ internship at the independent publishing company No Libros (Spain, 2019). Her research is based on a construction of visual territorial markers of her own migratory process, all seen from her interactions with the city itself and its inhabitants. Natália’s images stem from her personal archive of memories but also her ability to map out imaginary fields through the appropriation of physical spaces. As Natália explores the issues related to displacement and the inadequacy of immigration seen from the perspective of everyday life, the simple act of walking symbolizes the artist’s attempt to enunciate herself within the territories she documents. Walking becomes a critical exercise, where the body itself operates as a printing machine of its own meanings. She currently lives in Lisbon and works worldwide.
https://www.conglomeradoatelierdocentro.com/sobre-cac
https://natloyola.com
